Week 5: Hermeneutics, Ethnomethodology and CA

Week 5: Hermeneutics, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
Jackie Clark

At the risk of saying this every week, I really like how Prassad writes and presents her chapters. It's straight forward but dense, while being easily readable. The chapter on Hermeneutics was very helpful, as I was quite confused about this term. I felt like I had heard it used in many different ways, and wondered if it was really that diverse or if people were just confused. Now I understand that it does have a long history and has come to represent a variety of philosophical and practical applications. The idea that texts are bound by the author's social location and historical context seems really logical and self evident to me. I was immediately reminded of my work in art history, when discussing political cartoons from the 19th century. They are virtually impossible to understand today without context and social location. In addition, as with many of the methodologies we have reviewed, there is a call for recognizing the interpreter (researcher) as part of the process. Heidegger and Gadamer's work in calling attention to this makes sense. Awareness of your social location, world view, and predispositions affect your interpretations of any situation.

The chapter on Ethnomethodology was enlightening, especially the differences between it and ethnography. Ethnomethodology fieldwork focuses on close examination rather than lengthy involvement . In addition, the difference between linguistic and situational was clear, leading me to think of dozens of ways we operate in social frameworks every day, "performing" roles like professional, student, teacher, woman, etc...I would agree that these frameworks are fragile, and when disrupted uncover disturbing realities. I can't help but think of 9/11, which is this week. A tremendous  example of a national disturbance of reality and social construction that we have never recovered from fully. I also thought about the example used of managerial performance and control. In terms of a feminist framework, how would this look? Definitely different. Feminist frameworks are disruptive to the accepted social order, but can be transformative too.

The articles were good examples of how these methodologies and philosophies look in real research. You could see in both the clear use of deep analysis and close examination of the conversations. The piece by Drew was CA or Linguistic Ethnomethodology, focusing on talk-in-interaction. He looked at how people construct talk and tried to capture the subtleties in constructing how people take turns in conversation. Because of the context heavy nature of the work, he chose not to code the conversations, as meaning would change even between the same people. I thought that subtle but powerful idea was really interesting and reinforced the painstaking process of constructing meaning as a researcher of others' conversation.

By contrast, the article about TWS did use coding to look for patterns in meaning between the participants who represented 2 distinctly different roles in social order. There were multiple things going on in this analysis, and multiple levels of meaning happening. It was sometimes difficult to capture everything that was going on between the subjects who were making meaning of the TWS system as well as determining if a student would be a good teacher. So, in reality, the researcher was forced to uncover meanings between each pair of raters, between each individual in the pair, and overall together. In the end, the results were very interesting, and not surprising to me given the complexity of the research questions. It could almost be predicted that each person and team would construct grading norms differently, and judge students differently, since these concepts are heavily grounded in social constructions and personal experience.